Wednesday 8 July 2009

Straightforward Guide to Employment Law
(2009)

60%

A more abstract guide to the law in this area that deals with the legal situation as it currently (2007) stands. The title is a little misleading since this is not the practical guide it implies it is. However, legal concepts are clearly explained albeit without representative case law examples. This is a good primer for anyone wishing to gain a broad overview of the subject before moving on to something more substantial and detailed.


Copyright © 2009 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

Employment Law
(2007)

80%

A practical guide to its subject that deals with the law as it currently (2007) stands regarding employment issues. The legal concepts are clearly explained with representative case law examples, which usefully help to put flesh on the bones of the more arcane aspects of UK law.


Copyright © 2009 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.co.uk) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

Tuesday 7 July 2009

Jacob’s Ladder
(1990)

80%

Intelligent, literate and sophisticated movie that treats its audience's intelligence with respect; successfully breathing new life into a hoary old premise. The ultimate focus is on a man slowly coming to terms with the accidental death of his young son, as his nightmares slowly become more real than his waking life such that they seem almost a substitute for it.

No great acting performances here; the actors merely play the parts of ordinary people going about their daily lives. Behavioural details make the relationships convincing and emotionally warm (especially Elizabeth Peña as the troubled hero's supportive girlfriend) while the 1970s are unobtrusively suggested without getting in the way of the story.

In retrospect, the twist ending is obvious, despite the biblical clues being subtly dropped into the audience's lap. The red herrings are basic to the structure of a well thought out script yet make sense - in context - as opposed to being just add ons designed to confuse. The religious symbolism here is unusually effective in being evocative of the spiritual pretensions of the movie but without being laid on thick.

This film's only failing lies in not finding a proper balance between its thriller and horror elements. The horror wins partly at the expense of the thriller; suggesting this movie could have profitably been two separate genre exercises rather than just the one.


Copyright © 2009 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

Blow-Up
(1966)

60%

Metaphysical whimsy asking a question of value only to schizoids and teenagers: What is Reality? A solipsistic murder mystery that we are never sure really is a murder mystery. Rather than being a film in its own right, it is mired in the narcissistic materialism and ennui of a Western culture desperate to make reality fit its desires – rather than the other way round. This explains the essential emptiness of the premise, partly masked by a realistic visual style.

A common flaw in supposedly serious films with little to say, the movie lacks the self awareness to understand its own conceit, so it - and its characters - desperately seek the solace of what isn't there. Reality is not so much being questioned, as being feared, since this film mistrusts the act of seeing - itself - and so, partly, invalidates itself. Do we see things as they are - or as we are? Moviegoing is questioned; this film being an example of the mediated, indirect experience it criticises. Could the photographer merely have imagined the murder and, figuratively and literally, blown it up out of all proportion?

We are presented here with an alienated, unearned pleasures culture; exacerbated by palliative emotional game playing; leading to the bored desire to believe life more sinister than it really is. Most people here possess deluded expectations and, given the choice, tend to reject reality. A murder really happened, but the witnesses do not really exist in their own right because the game is more real than its players to its players.

London is shot as it really is without the usual (Swinging Sixties) tourist trappings that soon date and distract attention from the universal themes explored, as the restless camera eloquently matches the restlessness of the central characters. Sort of puzzling good fun, but the boredom of the characters eventually transmutes itself into a lack of interest in the audience.


Copyright © 2009 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

Quantum of Solace
(2008)

RATING:80%
FORMAT:DVD

Bourne, Jason Bourne

A complex plot, with subtle humor, underlies a strange Bond film that comes across as something of an extended trailer - being so abbreviated in length - but a much better thriller than most. This one is somewhat narratively incoherent yet more emotionally engaging than previous 007 adventures. Its plotting jets all over the world in search of a story that is not obviously and self consciously appropriated from the Jason Bourne movies, whose style it copies - mostly successfully.

Smothering itself in humorous asides at present day (2008) power politics and the decline of Western global dominance, it begs the inevitable question of what is the point of such derring do – in both the real and espionage movie world? This is akin to the same entertainment problem for all spy thrillers after the collapse of the Soviet Union: A problem not fully resolved with the advent of Al Qaeda. This movie provides a not entirely satisfactory and naïve answer in the necessity for Western governments to elaborate a more ethical foreign policy.

James Bond is often an agent of Western imperialism. However, here he does not side with the Caucasian version of political hegemony in the Third World, but effectively criticizes it. Such poor nations (in this case, South American) are not so much governed by short lived tin pot dictators, but badly managed from afar as satellite clients of United States' oil interests. This may be a clever analogy to the present state of a culture that sees its international prestige waning in light of worldwide economic recession, but makes for somewhat indecisive entertainment. To get around this, the film moves at high velocity from one set piece to another; while creating the plotlines for future Bond movies in Le Chiffre and Mr White (both from the previous Casino Royale) being conspicuously left alive.

Uniquely, for a Bond film, this one is a direct sequel to its predecessor and continues almost exactly where that story left off. In the process, creating an arch villain of the Quantum organization that could easily appear in any number of successor movies, à la Blofeld of SPECTRE before he was finally killed off.

The featured players are treated with the customary respect, especially Gemma ARTERTON and Giancarlo GIANNINI who are both irresistibly amusing in their own right. However, Olga KURYLENKO fails to make her character believable in spite of it being well written. Mathieu AMALRIC is very good as the principal villain, but the film lets him down as an actor by neither giving him enough screen time nor enough to do.

Although entertaining, the risks the producers are taking with the Bond franchise risk Bond losing what made him Bond in the first place as he begins to resemble a Jason Bourne clone. However, this risk avoids the other one of the Bond formula going stale and the films failing at the box office, while more closely matching 007's risking his life for Queen and country. This one certainly improves with repeated viewings and may one day be regarded as a classic of its kind.


Copyright © 2009 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

Gran Torino
(2008)

80%

Engrossing movie about the changing demography of the United States both because of immigration and social & geographical mobility.

White Flight of the young leaves Clint EASTWOOD's character as the only White guy in his neighborhood. This then becomes an oblique analysis of what it is to be both American and White; positing both as quintessentially racist formations - insecure about the future.

EASTWOOD plays the curmudgeonly old racist with his customary aplomb – growling and scowling at all the most appropriate moments. The accent is on curmudgeonly here since it is impossible for him, as an actor, to convince as someone who really supports White supremacist politics. This means his fans know that this is going to be a far more life affirming tragedy than that.

The sense throughout the first half is of a White culture in decline from its own ethnic hubris being part replaced by hard working immigrants. The latter need to prove that they have earned their place within the wider economy while also having something to offer, culturally, to enrich it.

The White characters have serious generation gap type problems that are not nearly so pronounced within the Hmong minority shown here. Whites live in the past here in expecting the world to owe them a living while good, old fashioned manners fade into auld lang syne. This implies European Americans have become a cultureless people who mimic other cultures bad habits rather than develop their own. This explains why EASTWOOD's character discovers more in common with the Hmong than his own kids and grandkids.

This is a film about what Community and neighborliness really means rather than what we merely say it does. And also about what it is to be a man when surrounded by so much unmanliness in the form of a culture not coping well with multiculturalism and in decline for lack of any deep, mainstream roots and effective role models. Sin and redemption looms large in the lives of many of the male characters and propels the drama forward to its inevitable climax.

As Clint EASTWOOD gets older, his own mortality has become an enduring and major theme in his work as his characters make the most of life in order to give their death some meaning and honor. While not the best film EASTWOOD has ever made, this is a fitting tribute to one of the greatest stars Italy and Hollywood ever produced.

Hilarious in its own way with EASTWOOD clearly relishing a role that might be his last: The racist epithets fly thick and fast and are as funny as can be. Clearly, Mr EASTWOOD has no truck with the politically correct brigade and those of a nervous disposition should, perhaps, give this a miss. The style is deadpan; lacking the usual meretricious thrills that a film with a gang culture gun rivalry subplot could so easily have fallen prey to. Contrived, yes, but to make a very important point about a multiculture at a political crossroads. The playing of Ahney HER stands out as the spunky tomboy; taking to Eastwood's character like a duck to water.


Copyright © 2009 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

Persepolis
(2007)

60%

An elliptical memoir of a female Iranian's upbringing set during the 1970s, 80s & 90s. Her outspokenness during the Islamic Revolution leads her into exile in Austria and a culture she neither fully understands nor respects.

The style varies from literal realism to emotional expressionism and is, by turns, funny and grimly serious. The Islamic Revolutionary Guards come across as combined Thought and Sex Police who ensure that women's veils are worn in the correct way so as not to inflame the sexuality of passing males. This is all oddly reminiscent of the stories one heard of Christian Victorians draping piano legs for fear of exciting male ardor. Here Muslim fundamentalism and the Christian kind are compared unfavorably as being the same, in that both are obsessed with the suppression of human sexual expression, the enjoyment of which is essentially considered a vice.

The basic problem with this movie is that it never rises above being anything more than a shapeless anecdote; leading to its thematic weakness. The political analysis is feeble – especially about exactly that which the film constantly visualizes: The position of women in an Islamic republic. It is as if the child in the story never really grew up to properly understand her own predicament. The feeble characterization does not help at all here either.


Copyright © 2009 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

Friday 3 July 2009

Stalker
(1979)

40%

Worthy attempt at intelligent and introspective science fiction from master stylist and poet of cinema Andrei TARKOVSKY. By dispensing with most of the usual technological trappings of the genre (that is usually no more than scientistic pornography designed to conceal the lack of themes, story or realistic plot) we are left to ponder the deeper mystery.

This is a story of a rural area apparently destroyed by a meteorite where entire populations and investigators (Stalkers) disappear yet flowers bloom – albeit without a scent. In a sense, this is anti science fiction since it is more concerned with fiction than science.

Where this film has its biggest problem leis in the fact that so much time is devoted to revealing as little as possible. This all too easily becomes a frustrating meander rather than a gripping puzzle that we have an emotional investment in solving. Banal philosophical musings do not help much here, either. And the strong sense of everyone living in an emotional prison leads us to assume we are similarly imprisoned as we can only wonder when either a valid point is to be made or the film end.

However, the look of the film is stunning. The portraitist aspect of TARKOVSKY's cinema is well to the fore in close ups of actors who are supernaturally capable of delivering performances without moving their lips; in other words, without appearing to perform at all.


Copyright © 2009 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

Thursday 2 July 2009

Sleepwalking to Segregation?
(2009)


Although a rather academic text, it is right on the money about how Whites see migration to be a threat to themselves. (There is also a Quick Reference Summary as an appendix that could serve as the basis of a Website and should be read first.)

For example, the myth of minority White UK cities was invented to frighten Whites whose judgement of rights is based on ethnicity. This unfounded racist fear is that Whites would lose rights if they are in the minority, yet Whites rarely advance such arguments when the middle class (or men) are in the minority in a given area. This moral panic also contains the implicit assumption that only Whites can create a cohesive and integrated society because only They are governable - despite the fact that Whites are divided by social class. Moreover, Whites never say with whom They are integrated; making Whiteness the superior culture into which others must integrate. This one way relationship of master to slave cannot work; explaining many of the current (2009) social problems prevalent in the UK.

These problems are the vague ones of parallel communities, segregation and immigration which is subsumed within a White, folkloric 'litany' of labeling inner city diverse areas as ghettos, of asylum seekers & immigrants as freeloaders, of Muslims as isolationists. Yet, if ghettos, freeloaders and isolationists are the real problem then why are they never the targets of political debate instead of diversity, asylum seekers, immigrants & Muslims. Without the moral courage to specifically name perceived problems, Whites perpetuate a polity based on ignorance, prejudice and the abuse of freely available statistics that this book contains in abundance; thereby playing the race card. This proves such problems result from Whites painting them as racial problems rather than long term trends in, say, housing and employment that would happen anyway. Thus, it is demanded of minorities that they must change in order to solve problems initiated by Whites.

And the most interesting aspect of White racism, here, is always the claim that if Blacks behave differently, they are to blame for the racism they experience - as if they were asking for it. Yet, the claim that rape victims were asking for it was long ago dismissed as sexism and so this should now be dismissed as the racism it so clearly is. And, since there are no racist epithets relating to behavior, it follows that behavior is not the real issue here but appearance.

The best indicator of integration with British values (expressed in the common law) is of the existence of mixed ethnicity – the fastest growing ethnicity in the UK. Yet, the quote that forms this book's title comes from the current (2009) chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, Trevor Phillips who, despite his position, cheerleads the racism of the British National Party and MigrationWatchUK.

The basic problem for Whites living in an ethnically diverse land is one of identity. Because Britishness is impossible to define since it is in a state of permanent flux, the easier option is to define it in terms of what it is not. When foreigners, minorities, asylum seekers and migrants are rejected, the British are asserting their sense of national identity. Belonging means saying who belongs and who does not, and those who are permanently labeled as "not belonging" get no say in altering their social status. This proves that the ideology of race prejudice is historically embedded in British society and ingrained in thinking, culture, institutions, ways of conduct, communications and emotions that is constantly reinforced. 'Postcolonial melancholia' also says something about the uncertainty over national identity characterized by groups like the BNP, who see multiculturalism as 'inverted racism' and migration as a 'reverse invasion'.

This book calls for evidence based social policy and the separation of statistics from their interpretation to avoid the fallacy that facts speak for themselves. However, this is a steep hill to climb because of the enormous vested interests to be challenged.


INVENTION OF THE WHITE RACE:
The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America
(1997)

80%

This is essentially an economic history of White racism in the United States since such racism is today largely explicable with reference to the legacy of wider, economic forces. By beginning with the slavery of the past, the book implicitly states that White racism is the theory; Black slavery, the practice.

The "peculiar institution" of race slavery began as a result of a need for social control. Poor whites could obtain the one right denied Blacks – the presumption of liberty – simply by being White. Whites' inevitable resentment at their poverty was thus easily deflected from their class oppressors onto Blacks - who were forced into slavery and thus shown as inferior by a process of self fulfilling, legalized prophecy; ie, racist 17th century laws. By protecting all Whites from slavery, Whites formed a united front against Blacks and a false unity among themselves. The Marxist perspective of this book posits an allegedly classless society where race substitutes for class and class enmities are excised from the mind to create unity of purpose among Whites.

Interestingly, indentured White servants were guinea pigs for slavery. The sexual exploitation of female servants, the whipping post, chains, branding irons, overseers and house servants were all mechanisms tried out and perfected on Whites. Without the support of poor and indentured servants among Whites, race slavery would have been impractical. What Blacks and poor Whites had in common – poverty and the Servant Trade – was emotionally eradicated by the creation of a White race (without biological foundation) to falsely distinguish Whites from Blacks & Indians; thereby avoiding indigent and servile rebellions among Whites. And these Whites became an intermediate social control stratum much like the middle class today acting as a buffer between the lower and upper classes of the West. (Moreover, Christians cannot enslave Christians under English common law at the time allowing Africans to be so enslaved, in principle, because they were not thereby protected.)

This highly detailed yet intensely readable guide seeks to address the gross evasions usually perpetuated by White historians on this all too important subject about the origins of Western culture. Unusually for a White author, this book also actually contains an objective definition of White racism. The very concept of a White Race is inherently oppressive since it allows Whites to see themselves as White first and human second – which can serve no other purpose than to further racist interests; otherwise, why bother?


Copyright © 2009 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

Wind Will Carry Us
(2000)

80%

A beautiful and fascinating look at some basic metaphysical and existential issues such as life and death and the relationship between cultural tradition and social change.

The ostensible plot involves a mystery as to why an engineer visits a small village claiming to work in telecoms when it soon becomes apparent that he is waiting for a village elder to die. Eventually he becomes partly integrated into this rural culture by virtue of being forced to stay there for longer than he had originally anticipated.

This is a subtly funny and deceptively simple yet profoundly rewarding film about people in tune with nature rather than in conflict with it. This is humorously expressed by jokes about a woman's three daily jobs: Work all day; serve in the evening; and then, more work at night. And by the oftentimes non utility of modern technology when, every time the central character receives a mobile phone call, he must drive out of the Black Valley - in which the village is situated - to get good hilltop reception. This running joke is, perhaps, a little overused and the film's overall length too long, but it makes its point well.


Copyright © 2009 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

Wednesday 1 July 2009

Vixen!
(1968)

RATING:80%
FORMAT:Cinema



Good example of the maturer Russ Meyer style; incorporating adultery, incest, lesbianism, White racism, draft dodging and the great outdoors. The political themes are broadly sketched and well-integrated into the plot without seeming tacked on for effect. Female sexual pleasure is foregrounded in the shape of the lusciously built and insatiably pneumatic Erica Gavin. Take me to Cuba!


Copyright © 2009 Frank TALKER. Permission granted to reproduce and distribute it in any format; provided that mention of the author’s Weblog (http://franktalker5.blogspot.com/) is included: E-mail notification requested. All other rights reserved.

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Science:



No science is immune to the infection of politics and the corruption of power.



Jacob Bronowski… (1908 - 74), British scientist, author. Encounter (London, July 1971).


Sleep of Reason:



The dream of reason produces monsters. Imagination deserted by reason creates impossible, useless thoughts. United with reason, imagination is the mother of all art and the source of all its beauty.



Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes… (1746-1828), Spanish painter. Caption to Caprichos, number 43, a series of eighty etchings completed in 1798, satirical and grotesque in form.


Humans & Aliens:



I am human and let nothing human be alien to me.



Terence… (circa 190-159 BC), Roman dramatist. Chremes, in The Self-Tormentor [Heauton Timorumenos], act 1, scene 1.


Führerprinzip:



One leader, one people, signifies one master and millions of slaves… There is no organ of conciliation or mediation interposed between the leader and the people, nothing in fact but the apparatus - in other words, the party - which is the emanation of the leader and the tool of his will to oppress. In this way the first and sole principle of this degraded form of mysticism is born, the Führerprinzip, which restores idolatry and a debased deity to the world of nihilism.